Briana Waters' conviction in bombing tossed

FILE - In this March 10, 2006 file photo, Briana Waters, holding her daughter, enters the U.S. Federal Courthouse for her arraignment in Seattle. A federal appeals court on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2010 ordered a new trial for Waters, who was convicted of helping to carry out a 2001 ecoterror attack that destroyed the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle. (AP Photo/seattlepi.com, Meryl Schenker, File) MAGS OUT; NO SALES; SEATTLE TIMES OUT; TV OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT less

FILE - In this March 10, 2006 file photo, Briana Waters, holding her daughter, enters the U.S. Federal Courthouse for her arraignment in Seattle. A federal appeals court on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2010 ordered a ... more

Photo: Meryl Schenker, AP

Briana Waters' conviction in bombing tossed

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A federal appeals court overturned an Oakland woman's conviction for taking part in a radical environmental group's firebombing of a research center Wednesday and said prosecutors shouldn't have been allowed to tell the jury she was reading dangerous literature.

An admitted firebomber testified at Briana Waters' 2008 trial in Seattle that Waters had given her a folder filled with anarchist writings. One article, read to the jury, reveled in the "intense pleasure" of "bashing in the skull of society." Another article called for attacks on the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Capitol and Disneyland.

Waters, an environmental activist, acknowledged knowing several other defendants but denied helping them or being a member of the Earth Liberation Front. She was convicted of arson and sentenced to six years in prison.

In Wednesday's ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the articles did not bear Waters' fingerprints and there was no evidence that she had read them.

But even if she had, the court said, a defendant's reading material seldom proves anything about her conduct and often inflames a jury.

The articles' "repugnant and self-absorbed embrace of destruction is likely to have swayed jurors' emotions, leading them to convict Waters not because of the facts before them but because she represented a threat to their own values," Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in the 3-0 ruling.

The ruling entitles Waters to a new trial. Defense lawyer Dennis Riordan said he would seek to free her on bail from a federal prison in Connecticut to rejoin her 5-year-old daughter in the Bay Area.

"It's extraordinarily dangerous to try to draw inferences about what a person thinks from what they read," Riordan said.

The U.S. attorney's office in Seattle declined to comment.

Three other people were convicted of taking part in the firebombing. The attack was aimed at the office of a professor who the radical group believed - mistakenly, authorities said - was genetically engineering trees.

Two of the defendants testified against Waters. A third, who did not testify, committed suicide in prison.

Waters said her co-defendants' testimony was motivated by personal grudges and denied any affiliation with the Earth Liberation Front or its advocacy of property destruction.

She tried to introduce a video she had made of a peaceful environmental protest in which she had participated as a college student in Olympia, Wash.

The trial judge, the late Franklin Burgess, refused to allow it - a decision, the appeals court said, that contributed to the trial's "one-sided picture of Waters" and may have led to her conviction.